Monday, November 19, 2012

Hangout at the Palace of Versailles

Hangout Quest is a fun Google+ game that involves you tracking down famous works of art in the Palace of Versailles. In the game you can compete against friends in a Google Hangout to find selected paintings.

At the beginning of the game you are shown the painting that you must find. You then need to virtually explore the corridors of the Palace of Versailles in Google Street View. As you walk around the palace in Street View you are given clues as to whether you are hot or cold in your search.

The winner is of course the first person to find the painting.

Once you have finished playing hunt the artwork on Google Hangout then why not head over to Google Art Project and find out a little more about the paintings that you found in the Palace of Versailles.

In Art Project you can explore galleries around the world. Many of the galleries include Street View imagery which mean that you can virtually explore the artworks on display. As you walk around the galleries in Street View you can click on individual paintings to find out about the artist and the art work.

You can even zoom in on details in the selected paintings. The two screenshots above both show the same painting. In the screenshot taken from Art Project you can see how close you can zoom in on individual paintings.

If all of this has whetted your appetite to find out even more about the Palace of Versailles then you can visit the Google World Wonders Project. The World Wonders Project allows you to explore the palace in 3d using the Google Earth browser plugin. The project also includes a number of videos about the palace and a number of photographs from Getty Images and Panoramio.